Cari Beauchamp, the widely respected historian and author of several books on Hollywood who often appeared on Turner Classics Movies programming and at the network’s annual TCM Classic Film Festival, has died. She was 74.
TCM posted a tribute to Beauchamp on its Twitter/X page Friday.
“We are saddened to hear of the loss of one of our TCM family, trailblazing historian Cari Beauchamp,” the network wrote today. Without her invaluable work, many female creatives would be lost to history. We are grateful for her many contributions to our network over the years.”
Beauchamp’s work focused on the role of women in Hollywood, including in her books Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and The Powerful Women of Early Hollywood and Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s. She also wrote Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years, edited Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by the Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and co-wrote Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival.
She was nominated for a WGA Award in 2001 for co-writing the documentary version of Without Lying Down, which first appeared on TCM. She wrote the 2003 Independent Lens documentary The Day My God Died, which exposed the child sex trade in India. The doc earned a Best Documentary Emmy nom.
She also frequently appeared as a talking head in documentaries that focused on Hollywood, including TCM’s Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood and The Story of Film. She also weighed in for the 2018 documentary Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.
Beauchamp, who early in her career was a political campaign manager and served as Press Secretary to California Gov. Jerry Brown, became an important voice regarding all matters relating to Hollywood history. According to her bio, she was twice named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar, and she was resident scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation.
“Sadly, we pay our respects to Cari Beauchamp, who, in her dedication to writing about powerful women in film, left her mark on the industry,” the latter foundation posted today. “We are grateful to have known Cari. She made an invaluable contribution to Mary Pickford’s legacy & so many female pioneers of cinema.”
Beauchamp was popular on the speaker circuit, giving speeches at AMPAS, the British Film Institute, the Edinburgh Film Festival, Cannes, the Women’s Museum of Art in Washington D.C. and elsewhere. She was a regular speaker and moderator at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.
As a writer, her byline appeared in such publications as Deadline’s sister sites Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Vanity Fair.
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Source: DLine
